What “Cure” doesn’t do particularly well is introduce a mystery, add menace and heighten suspense in racing towards a conclusion. There’s no “Race” for the “Cure.” Still, it’s just chilling to experience, a novel and thought-provoking take on what ails us and our fruitless search for relief.

In its braggadocios final form, genre fans have a unicorn watch that surely won’t be replicated anytime soon. Points for creativity, points for ambition, and points for a studio showing the balls to back provocative genre cinema.

It is all of the harrowing horror of an asylum film with none of the deeper, more disconcerting subtext or mind-bending logic puzzles — a film not entirely devoid of merit, but nonetheless hobbled by poor storytelling.

The movie deprives us of either a tragic villain or a sympathetic lead, hoping that its grab bag of squirm-inducing details — dental drills, stillborn livestock, flesh-eating eels — will suffice, when in fact, they reveal how a shorter, tighter treatment ought to have done the trick.

42

The PlaylistKevin Jagernauth

A Cure For Wellness is an exercise in watching a film continually stifle itself at its most compelling moments.

We get a few effective set pieces early on that provide the requisite scares that A Cure for Wellness so obviously wants to deliver, but the movie just doesn’t know when to quit, lurching onward and growing more and more ludicrous.